The Crane Wife

I actually think the point of the essay is that you should allow yourself to have needs and to be who you are. There are a lot of people in the world who want you to be who they think you are. My therapist once told me that "feedback is like trying on clothes. When someone hands you a shirt, the polite thing to do is to try it on and see how it fits you. But not every shirt is your style, and not every piece of feedback is true."

I think what she means is remarkable as in unusual, not as in worth commenting on. The fiancé was a man she had spent years of her life dating, courting, evaluating, and before that whom she had met through mutual friends. Jeff was some guy on a bird-watching trip that she joined on essentially a whim. The whole essay is, in a sense, a large remark on Jeff (and Lindsay), but the remark is precisely how natural it was for them to do what they did, how they aren't people who are impossible to find.

Jeff knew she needed to drive the boat, to symbolically steer her own life, rather than being railroaded and being convinced to like it like her asshole ex did to her. And among normal caring people, guys like Jeff are the norm.

I'm pretty sure seeking out the logical fallacies in a story like this is not the point...

There are some sections of society where these attitudes are still common. We self-select our peer groups and so don’t see a representative sample of humanity as a whole. This leaves people like the author still fighting the old gender wars, and people like us saying “hey steady on”, and a lot of people talking past each other due to different definitions and experiences.

I agree, I don't think these generalizations are accurate. If anything the opposite has social encouragement.

It sounds like the author was engaged to a person who is more emotionally distant than average. But I also wonder how she would've responded to the opposite.

In this case, he didn't fawn over her by telling her how beautiful she looked in her dress, for example. At the same time, that sort of aloofness might have contributed something to her interest in him. If he were the type to overly fawn over her, she might not have considered him as high status, and might never have tried to marry him.

To be exceedingly frank, I'm more interested in the story of how these two people managed to decide they wanted to get married when from the very outset he's clearly a robot pretending to be a human and she's emotionally malnourished. Did he think she would just "get over it"? Did she think marrying him would turn him into a totally different person?

I think it works better if you take the genders out of it:

> “When people desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a another person needs they are needy.”

I've seen this story many times with both men and women featuring in both roles, and I think the lesson can apply, therefore, to anyone who reads it. As a general rule, society at large favors the provider; whichever of the two is bringing home the bacon. I've found this to be true across classes, and thanks to an increasing number of women getting the role, across the genders too.

I think as a species humans tend to ally with the ones we perceive to be stronger on an instinctual level, which when you consider our origins as a social animal, is really not surprising. I think the 1950's housewife trope was less to do with actual sexism of the populace, and far more to do with the sexism present in the job market. Men held the jobs; therefore, women had to clean the house. What the hell else were they going to do?

Yet, now you regularly see women just as sociopathic and socially detached from their husbands as many husbands were back then; they see their marriages as a convenience, their husbands as a source of child care and free labor, just as men did. And they cheat on their husbands with men they meet in their work lives, just as the men did before. And if the woman is bringing home enough bacon more than her husband, the end result is also the same; she rules him, because he has no options. Because being a homemaker is no career path and the longer a person is in that line of work, the less employable they become.

And this is not to say women are worse or better, in fact, it's to say they're largely the same. It's to say that both women and men, when given more or less entire dominion over another person, will treat that person, by and large, equally shitty.

Edit; I think it's also worth noting that the high success types, the ones who make enough money to sustain an expensive lifestyle on their own with a dependent, is a self-selected group of generally speaking, socially distant and cool/calculating type of people. That's an important distinction to make, and I should've made it on the first go.